Top 10 parallel narratives

What makes a novel a novel? The word comes from the Latin novus, meaning new, via the Italian novella storia, “new story”, so it can seem a contradiction in terms when someone protests that a book “is not a novel”. The very term suggests something original, unfamiliar – and yet one knows what the disappointed reader means. The parts don’t add up to a satisfying whole; the new story feels too disjointed or unfinished; the two or eight or 28 chapters don’t sufficiently cohere.
For many novelists, however, it’s precisely a traditional sense of continuity and completion that one simultaneously... read more

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